Denials and Still More Questions

THE issue of political espionage in the 1972 presidential campaign has persisted--a tangled, melodramatic business, occurring like a backstage fistfight, somewhere still in the margins of the voters' consciousness. The matter remained a volatile presence, however, and last week the din of charges and countercharges grew louder as Republicans and Democrats exchanged bitter words over the implications of the Watergate investigation. Without challenging a single point of reported fact, the President's men denied any wrongdoing and attacked the press for printing the stories. Even so, there were new revelations of White House connections with a fat slush fund used to finance political spying.

TIME has learned that still another figure who held an important White House position before moving to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President played a key role in the Watergate case. He is Jeb Stuart Magruder, now one of the Nixon committee's deputy directors. Before he joined C.R.P. in April of 1971, Magruder was first an assistant to H.R. Haldeman, the President's chief of staff, and later to Herb Klein, Nixon's Director of Communications--giving Magruder about two years on the White House staff. It was known earlier that the cash used to finance the wiretapping at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate last June came from the Nixon committee; Justice Department files now show that Magruder was the C.R.P. official who authorized the expenditures.

According to Justice Department attorneys, Magruder gave his approval for the use of up to $250,000 to be spent on what the attorneys called "political intelligence operations." It is not known whether that entire amount was spent, but at least $50,000 was withdrawn for this purpose out of a secret fund of possibly $700,000 in cash kept in the office of Maurice Stans, former Secretary of Commerce and now finance chairman of the Nixon committee. Justice Department officials told TIME that Magruder hired another former White House aide, G. Gordon Liddy, to head the political intelligence squad for the committee. Liddy, who has been indicted in the Watergate case, was authorized by Magruder to spend the $250,000. The actual payments were made to Liddy by the committee's treasurer at the time, Hugh Sloan, who took the cash from Stans' safe. Sloan, a Republican fund raiser beginning in 1966, was a staff assistant to the President before joining C.R.P.

The only record of these disbursements from the secret fund was kept by Sloan on a single sheet of lined yellow paper. It was destroyed by a top C.R.P. official. Other relevant papers, Justice Department officials said, were destroyed by Liddy within hours after the predawn arrests at the Watergate. He used a paper shredder in the C.R.P. offices for about 30 minutes that morning.

Magruder, a Santa Monica, Calif., business executive who coordinated Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign in the Los Angeles area, told the Justice Department that he thought the intelligence money was to be used to get information about radicals and antiwar protesters who might try to disrupt the Republican National Convention. He denied authorizing any funds for illegal purposes. A certain conspiratorial mood among the White House staff is illustrated by one of Magruder's former assignments there. He moved from Haldeman's staff to Klein's, TIME has learned, to watch Klein for Haldeman, who has a habit of keeping a sharp eye on the activities of staff members.

Scattered. Some of the men who were in various positions on the committee when the Watergate case broke on June 17 have since scattered (see chart). Liddy was fired from the committee on June 28 when he refused to answer FBI questions. Sloan left the committee shortly after the Watergate breakin. John Mitchell, the former Attorney General, was head of the Nixon committee at the time but quit on July 1, ostensibly because his wife Martha wanted to get him out of politics. So far unexplained is the mystery surrounding Martha Mitchell's claim that only five days after the Watergate arrests, Steve King, now head of security for the Nixon committee, ripped a telephone off the wall of a Newport Beach, Calif., motel room where she and her husband were staying, threw her on a bed and held her while a doctor gave her an injection. She was cut badly enough on the hand in this fracas, the Washington Post reported last week, to require hospital emergency room treatment. The man who took her there, said the Post, was Nixon's personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach.

Still very much in place in his windowless west-wing office is Dwight Chapin, deputy assistant to the President, who with White House Staff Assistant Gordon Strachan had hired Donald H. Segretti to recruit agents to help "disrupt" the primary campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates. TIME reported earlier (Oct. 23) that Segretti had received from Herbert Kalmbach more than $35,000 for his services. Kalmbach in turn got the money from the secret fund in Stans' safe. This information was based on statements made by both Segretti and Kalmbach to FBI agents.

Later, last week, the New York Times reported that a telephone in Segretti's home was used to make 28 calls to Chapin's home, the White House or the office of the indicted Hunt. The Washington Post reported that only five people had authority to approve payments from the Stans fund: Stans, Kalmbach, Magruder, Mitchell and an unidentified "high White House official." The Post also claimed that White House aides had coached Segretti on what to say to the Watergate grand jury and that when he appeared before the jury, the U.S. attorneys who were prosecuting the case did not even ask whom he worked for. A woman juror did, however, and Segretti named Chapin.

Innuendo. It is still not clear what Segretti's specific duties were, or just how unusual his campaign against Democratic candidates was; but the words "disruption" and "harass" were used by Segretti in talking to the Justice Department. The Nixon committee responded to the disclosures with a denial that anyone "in authority" had "authorized or approved or had any prior knowledge of the break-in at the Watergate or any other illegal activities." At the White House, Speechwriter Pat Buchanan claimed that the news stories were politically motivated. "We're not gonna play that game," he said. Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler denied that anyone at the White House had "directed acts of sabotage, spying or espionage" against the Democrats and charged that the stories were based on "hearsay, character assassination, innuendo and guilt by association." Clark MacGregor, Nixon's campaign director, angrily denounced the Post in particular for using "huge scare headlines" and acting "maliciously" and with "hypocrisy" to link the White House to such political espionage. Uncharacteristically, the usually candid MacGregor did not allow newsmen to question him. Senator Robert Dole, the Republican National Chairman, accused McGovern and the Post of being "in a partnership in mudslinging."

Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray was also incensed at the press, apparently because of reports that his agency had moved slowly and narrowly on the political sabotage investigations. "The press wants to hear that I'm a political son of a bitch," he protested to TIME Correspondent Sandy Smith. "I'm getting pissed off at the rumors circulating in the incestuous circle around here [Washington]. They're trying to get to the President through me. They're trying to attack the FBI."

In taking the offensive, MacGregor also charged that publications had a "double standard" in not pursuing acts of political sabotage against the Republicans. He claimed that McGovern workers have planted spies within the Nixon campaign and had even done so within Hubert Humphrey's staffs during the Democratic primary campaigns. He cited what he called examples of "proven facts of opposition-incited disruptions of the President's campaign." They included the discovery of a Molotov cocktail at one Nixon headquarters, fire damage at two others and window breaking at Nixon storefront campaign offices in three cities. The Post checked out each incident, found widespread violence against Nixon campaign offices in the nation but no evidence that McGovern's committees were involved in them. On the other hand, when various Democratic candidates reported acts of sabotage, there was often no evidence that these deeds had any connection with Republicans.

The charges against the Nixon committee--the substance of which has not yet been specifically denied--are serious, even though the activity looks inane and unnecessary. The kindest explanation is that Nixon is surrounded by overzealous aides who feel that they are expected to do everything possible to assure his decisive reelection. With this mentality, anything that seems to help or protect the President appears proper to them, even though in this case it can only damage Nixon.

Up to Ears. As the controversy grew, George McGovern pounded away at the issue on nearly every stop, employing often shrill and exaggerated oratory. At a labor rally in Essington, Pa., he charged that Nixon is "the kind of man who will not hesitate to try to wiretap your union hall or your university or your church or your home." He told airport crowds in Toledo that the Republicans had wiretapped the telephones of the Democratic presidential candidates in the primaries "and they had us followed and members of our families followed all the time. Nixon is up to his ears in political sabotage. He has got to take responsibility for it."

That was, of course, making a long leap--from acts of still rather vague political dirty work by political underlings to placing direct responsibility on Nixon. Yet McGovern did have a point in contending in Detroit that the Watergate and the secret G.O.P. spying fund were much more serious matters than more celebrated scandals like the disclosures that Harry Vaughan, an inside operator in the Truman Administration, had accepted a Deepfreeze from a lobbyist and that President Eisenhower's closest aide, Sherman Adams, had received a vicuna coat and a rug. Asked why there was no uproar now over the Republican activities, McGovern replied: "Life is a struggle between our better impulses and more selfish, baser instincts. No one ever knows how that struggle will resolve itself. We can only hope that the American people do care." Trying to get them to care, McGovern has scheduled a national television broadcast this week on "Morality and Decency in Government."

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